[Cialug] Upgrade questions

[Stuart Thiessen]

Hi! I wanted to ask a question that is surely a newbie question ...

Ok, I have a server running SuSE 9.2.  I know that is an older version 
so I was thinking maybe I should upgrade it to newer specs to avoid 
patching issues, etc.

My main question is this ... how do I really do upgrades of the 
operating system without it affecting my data and configuration files 
for different services?  Have they come up with a methodology by which 
you can update your system well and inform you of the gotchas, or you 
just have to read up on all the new versions and manually update each 
program that creates a gotcha situation?

On my particular system, I have /, /boot, /opt, /usr, /home, /var all 
on different partitions. I am assuming if I upgraded to a newer version 
of SuSE or decided to go with a different distribution, that I could 
just update all the other partitions but leave /home untouched, right?  
What about httpd configurations or other server configs? I know I 
should back them up before upgrading, but then just restore them on top 
of the upgrade or is there a better system for managing these kinds of 
situations so that you don't have to go server by server and 
restore/fix everything?

Does this make sense?

Stuart